Point Blank is a 1967 American crime film directed by John Boorman. It stars Lee Marvin, with Angie Dickinson, Keenan Wynn, and Carroll O'Connor also appearing in the film. The movie is based on the 1962 crime noir pulp novel The Hunter, which is the first book in the Parker series written by Donald E. Westlake under the pen name Richard Stark. Boorman directed the film because Marvin asked him to, and Marvin helped shape the film’s development. In 1967, the film earned over $9 million in theatrical rentals. Over time, it became a cult classic, with some critics, like film historian David Thomson, praising it. In 2016, Point Blank was recognized as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress. It was added to the National Film Registry for preservation.

Plot

Walker teams up with his friend Mal Reese to steal from a large criminal group. They attack a courier on the empty island of Alcatraz. After counting the stolen money, Reese shoots Walker, leaving him to die. Reese takes the money and Walker's wife, Lynne. Walker survives and, with help from a mysterious man named Yost, starts searching for Reese to get his share of the money, which is $93,000. Reese used all the money to pay off a debt to a criminal group called "The Organization." Walker travels to Los Angeles, where he shoots at Lynne's bed but finds Reese has already left. Lynne is very sad and later dies from taking too many sleeping pills.

Walker asks a car dealer named Stegman for information. He scares Stegman until he reveals that Reese is with Walker's sister-in-law, Chris. Walker visits Chris and learns she dislikes Reese and respects Walker. She agrees to help by pretending to have a romantic meeting with Reese in his secure apartment, where she will unlock a door for Walker. Walker ties up men in an apartment across from the penthouse and calls the police to create a distraction, allowing him to enter the penthouse.

With a gun to Reese's head, Walker forces him to reveal the names of his Organization leaders—Carter, Brewster, and Fairfax—so he can get his money back. He then makes Reese, who is only wearing a bedsheet, stand on a balcony to meet Carter. Suddenly, a bodyguard turns on the lights in the room, startling Walker. He pulls Reese backward by the bedsheet, causing Reese to accidentally fall off the balcony and die. Walker watches as Reese falls.

Walker later confronts Carter for his money but is tricked into a trap. A sniper is hired to kill him during a money pickup in Los Angeles. Walker suspects a trap and makes Carter retrieve the money instead. Carter and Stegman are shot during the pickup. The sniper leaves, and Walker finds only blank paper in the money package.

Yost takes Walker to a house owned by Brewster. Walker visits Chris's apartment, which has been destroyed by The Organization. He takes Chris to Brewster's house, claiming she will be safer there. While waiting for Brewster, Chris hits Walker repeatedly, but he does not defend himself. Later, Chris teases Walker and hits him with a pool cue. They embrace and spend the night together. The next morning, Brewster is attacked by Walker, who demands his money. Walker forces Brewster to call Fairfax, but Fairfax refuses to pay. Brewster says the only cash available is in San Francisco. "The drop has changed, but the run is still the same," he explains.

At Fort Point, Walker hides as a courier delivers the money. A sniper shoots Brewster. Yost appears, saying Walker did not kill Brewster. Brewster calls out, "This is Fairfax, Walker! Kill him!"

Yost/Fairfax thanks Walker for removing his dangerous enemies, telling him, "Our deal is done, Walker. Brewster was the last one." He offers a partnership, but Walker does not respond. Yost/Fairfax and the hitman leave, leaving the money on the ground.

Production

This was the second movie made by Irwin Winkler, who had recently directed Double Trouble at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Winkler and Judd Bernard believed the Point Blank script would be perfect for Lee Marvin. They had difficulty getting the script to Marvin, so they sent it to John Boorman, a director Winkler knew from his earlier work in management. Filmink stated the movie "had many connections to Nat Cohen," as Winkler had previously worked on Darling, and Boorman and writer Alex Jacobs had recently made Catch Us if You Can for Cohen.

Boorman met Marvin in London, where the actor was filming The Dirty Dozen. Boorman and Marvin discussed a script based on the book The Hunter by Donald Westlake. They both disliked the script but admired the main character, Walker. After agreeing to work on the film, Marvin decided not to use the script and called a meeting with the studio head, producers, his agent, and Boorman. As Boorman recalled, Marvin asked, "Do I have final approval of the script?" They said "yes." "And do I have final approval of the main cast?" "Yes." He said, "I give all those decisions to John [Boorman]." Then he left. Boorman noted, "On my first film in Hollywood, I had final control over the movie, and I used it."

MGM agreed to fund the film with a budget of $2 million. MGM’s head of production, Robert Weitman, wanted Stella Stevens to play the female lead, but Boorman and Marvin insisted on Angie Dickinson. Winkler later said he was not surprised to see Stevens cast in a later MGM film, Sol Madrid.

The film’s unusual structure was partly due to the original script, which followed the non-linear story of the novel, and changes made during filming. Rehearsals took place at Marvin’s home in Los Angeles. During one rehearsal, Marvin refused to speak his lines when asking Sharon Acker about missing money, forcing Acker to continue the conversation alone. Boorman said, "I saw right away he was right. Lee never gave suggestions. He would just show you." To fix the scene, Boorman changed the script so Acker would ask and answer Marvin’s questions, which became part of the final film. Boorman added, "It made a simple scene more meaningful."

This was the first film shot at Alcatraz Island, the famous prison in San Francisco that had closed in 1963, just three years before the production. Filming at the abandoned prison required 125 crew members for two weeks. While Marvin and Wynn enjoyed the location, Wynn worried about the weather and the need to re-record half the dialogue. During the shoot, Angie Dickinson and Sharon Acker modeled modern clothing for a Life Magazine feature set against the prison’s backdrop. Acker was accidentally injured by blanks used in a scene where Vernon shot at Marvin.

Director Boorman chose locations described as "stark." For example, the airplane terminal walkway where Marvin walked originally had flower pots along the walls. Boorman removed the pots to "make it all bare." After showing the final cut to executives, they were "very confused and talked about needing reshoots." Margaret Booth, the supervising film editor for MGM, told Boorman as the executives left, "You touch one frame of this film over my dead body!"

Reception

The film made $9 million from movie theaters during its first release.

In her 1967 New Yorker review of Bonnie and Clyde, Pauline Kael wrote: "A harsh new melodrama is called Point Blank, and it is." Kael later described the film as "sometimes very impressive" and voted for John Boorman as Best Director in the 1967 National Society of Film Critics Awards. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and said, "as suspense thrillers go, Point Blank is pretty good." Leonard Maltin gave the film three and a half stars and wrote: "Tight and exciting thriller, not noticed much in 1967, but now [2008] considered one of the best films of the decade."

In The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther described the movie as "very stylish and well-photographed, showing some of the complex organization and dark aspects of human nature in the modern-day underworld." He also said director Boorman "did an amazing job of capturing the look and feel of Los Angeles in his film." He added, "This is not a pretty picture for young viewers—or, indeed, for anyone with sensitive tastes."

Slant reviewer Nick Schager wrote in a 2003 review: "What makes Point Blank so special is not how it breaks genre rules, but how Boorman uses unusual artistic styles to create a classic noir mood of deep tiredness and romanticized fate."

The film has a score of 93% on review site Rotten Tomatoes, based on 41 reviews. The site's summary says: "Shot with creative and impactful style and performed with cold and unemotional skill by Lee Marvin, Point Blank is a revenge thriller that shows the best parts of the genre with extreme intensity." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 86 out of 100, based on 15 critics, which means "highly praised by most critics."

Themes

Viewers and critics have often asked if the film shows a dream that Walker has after he is shot at the beginning. The film's director, John Boorman, did not give his opinion, saying, "What it is, is what you see." Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh described Point Blank as a "memory film" for Marvin. Boorman believes the film focuses on Lee Marvin's harsh experiences during World War II, which made him lose his sense of being human and led him to search for his humanity.

Critic David Thomson wrote that Walker is actually dead throughout the movie, and the events show the stages of revenge building up in his mind. Others, like Brynn White, have questioned whether Walker is a living person or a ghost, describing him as "a ghostly form of bitter revenge barely holding onto the film's different scenes." Boorman has said, "He could just as easily be a ghost or a shadow." Some critics describe Point Blank as "a haunted, dream-like film that uses experiments with space and time from modern European art films," especially the "time-broken" works of French director Alain Resnais.

Style

Point Blank mixes styles from film noir with ideas from the European nouvelle vague movement. The movie uses a broken timeline (like the book's non-linear story), unpredictable story pacing (long, slow scenes mixed with sudden violent moments), and careful use of space in the film (arranged scenes with concrete riverbeds, wide bridges, and empty prison cells). Boorman gave credit to Marvin for creating many of the film's visual symbols. Boorman explained that as the film developed, scenes were filmed in black and white with one main color (the cold blues and grays of Acker's apartment, Dickinson's butter yellow bathrobe, the bright red wall in Vernon's penthouse) to create a "sort of unreal" feeling.

To show Walker's legendary status, Soderbergh noted in the commentary that the film switches between a scene of Walker swimming away from Alcatraz Island and a scene of him on a ferry looking back at the same island, while a woman on a loudspeaker talks about how impossible it is to leave the island. Soderbergh said this contrast between Walker's easy escape and the loudspeaker's message makes the Walker character "legendary immediately."

Legacy

The movie Point Blank is praised in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die as "the perfect thriller in both form and vision." Film historian David Thomson calls the film a masterpiece. He also says, "[…] this is not just a cool, violent pursuit film, it is a wistful dream and one of the great reflections on how movies are fantasies that we are reaching out for all the time—it's singing in the rain again, the white lie that erases night." Director Steven Soderbergh has said that he used visual styles from Point Blank many times in his films.

The movie The Hunter was the inspiration for Brian Helgeland’s Payback (1999), which stars Mel Gibson. Director John Boorman joked that Payback was so poorly made that Gibson might have used the original script for Point Blank that Boorman and Marvin had discarded.

On March 29, 1968, Point Blank was shown in Cinelândia movie theaters in Brazil to protest the killing of 18-year-old high school student Edson Luís de Lima Souto by military police in Rio de Janeiro. Souto was shot at close range. Protesters wrote messages like "Do bullets kill hunger?" and "Old people in power, young people in coffins" on movie posters. The events following Souto’s death were among the first major public protests against the Brazilian military government.

Lee Marvin later expressed discomfort with his role in the film. In a 1983 interview, he said, "How did I feel when I saw myself on the screen? I found it very unpleasant recently when I saw a film of mine called Point Blank, which was a violent film. We made it for the violence. I was shocked at how violent it was. […] When I saw the film, I literally almost could not stand up, I was so weak. I did that? I am capable of that kind of violence? […] This is why I think guys back off eventually. They say, 'No, I'm not going to put myself to those demons again.'"